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Against This Age

Chapter 19: RELUCTANT LADY
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About This Book

A collection of poems that probes urban modernity, loneliness, and aesthetic decadence through vivid imagery and jagged rhythms. Voices shift between intimate monologue, ironic portraiture, and brisk city scenes to examine alienation, desire, and the artist’s uneasy stance within commodified life. Nighttime and street settings recur, juxtaposing glamour and squalor, while playful language alternates with moral heat and satire. Short character studies, conversational pieces, and formal experiments combine into a varied sequence that interrogates social manners, mortality, and the imagination’s attempts to resist conformity.

RELUCTANT LADY

The widely bruised, shy beauty of a brain
That renders dogmas bashful with its breath
Will raise its last, wan offering to death—
A poise of gossamer that takes the rain
Of darkness, with an unexpectant pride.
Your thoughts are old and yet too young for life
Whose ponderous sneer preserves their curling strife.
They wait for heavy spear-points, side by side.
You are a wilted pilgrim on a road
Where hills and rubbish-pits receive alike
The skeptical remonstrance of your pace.
You pass through towns and raise your thoughtful load
To shield your loves against the words that strike
The sheer, elastic trouble of your face.